The Amok of the I-5 Killer Begins
On October 9, 1980, Cherie Ayers, Woodfield’s former classmate, was raped and murdered in her Portland apartment. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck. During Woodfield’s prior four-year imprisonment, he and Ayers had reconnected by exchanging letters. Suspecting Woodfield’s involvement, the girl’s family contacted the authorities, and he was called in for questioning but refused to do a polygraph test. The detectives found his behavior suspicious, but his blood type didn’t match the semen they had found in the victim’s body, so no charges were filed.
One month later, Woodfield assaulted a twenty-two-year-old woman in her home, who was an ex-girlfriend of one of his close friends (Douglas Keith Altig). She was with Altig at the time, and Woodfield bound and shot to death both of them in her apartment. After the murders, Fix’s .32-caliber revolver was missing from the scene. Woodfield was questioned later by the police, but they had found no concrete evidence pointing to his involvement with the killings.
After killing Fix and Altig, Woodfield began a series of robberies throughout the northwest. He wore a fake beard and held up a gas station at gunpoint. A few days later, he raided an ice cream parlor and robbed a drive-in restaurant. He accosted a waitress in Seattle, trapping her in a restaurant bathroom and forcing her to give him a handjob.
By 1981, Woodfield earned the nickname ‘I-5 Bandit’ given by the police, referencing his crimes along the Interstate 5 corridor. In January, he held up the same Vancouver gas station he had robbed in December and forced a female employee to expose her breasts after he emptied the cash register. Three days later, he robbed a market in Eugene, and the next day shot and wounded a female grocery clerk at a store in Sutherlin, Oregon.
Two days later, he invaded a home occupied by two sisters (aged eight and ten) and raped them. Four days later, he sexually abused two women in an office building in Salem. Shari Hull, one of the victims, was killed by Woodfield while the other, Beth Wilmot, was wounded and left for dead. After the murder, he traveled to Oregon and committed several robberies during which he assaulted two females.
In February, Donna Eckard and her fourteen-year-old daughter had been shot several times in the head in their home at Mountain Gate, California. The daughter had also been sodomized. The same day in Redding, a female store clerk was kidnapped, raped, and sodomized in a holdup. The following day, an identical crime was reported in Yreka with the same man robbing an Oregon motel that night.
It seemed that Woodfield was on a killing spree, and nobody could stop him. A few days later, he held up a fabric store, molested a clerk and a customer, and also committed several robberies in that area.
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